Books That Reveal China's Cultural Constitution

Before I landed in Shanghai in 1998, even after four years of living in Hong Kong, my world view was "typically American." It's difficult for non-Americans to appreciate the sense of exceptionalism we grow up with. From Ronald Reagan's stirring references to the United States as a "shining city on a hill" to civil studies that represented American democracy as the culmination of Western history, we were raised with a quasi-religious belief in Jeffersonian ideals - an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness rooted in individualism - as the destiny of all mankind. For the past ten years, however, my job has been to advertise both Western and Chinese products to the Chinese. Some call me a sell out or, even worse, an abettor of dictators. Regardless, I quickly learned that brands must align themselves with a Chinese world view, lest they sacrifice both revenue and profit on the altar of cultural absolutism.

Topography: The Shape of A Nation's Soul

While no book can replace on-the-ground experience, several have been instrumental in shaping my view of Chinese values, social structure and cosmological beliefs. For me, the most eye-opening is Jonathan Spence's In Search of Modern China. The first chapters reveal how the Middle Kingdom's topography - i.e., the inherent instability of the Great Asian Land Mass, across which floods, droughts and famine present constant danger - has shaped a nation's psychology. He makes the crucial point that the role of the Chinese nation has always been to ensure physical survival. He further drives home how every strand of indigenous Chinese philosophy - Moism, Doaism, Confucianism and Legalism - reinforce stability and order as the only ultimate "good" and chaos as evil. After digesting his tome, a challenge read, I grasped why the Middle Kingdom is morally relativistic, a fundamental difference versus "enlightened" Western and rational absolutism.

Communism and Confucianism

Many books, including Jonathan Fenby's Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power and The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia Ebrey, reinforce a reality that modern Communism has been built on the back of Confucianism, still the cultural blueprint of the Peoples' Republic. Chinese citizens have always had great faith in, even reverence for, strong central leadership, a manifestation of the wu lun, or five key relationship "dyads" that constitute all ordered society. Any force capable of unifying heaven and earth, forging unity from disorder, is respected as having earned heaven's mandate, irrespective of Occidental definitions of human rights. Both the first emperor, Shi Huang Di, and Mao are celebrated as heroic figures because they unified the nation. To them, and the Chinese, conventional definitions of "human rights" were - and are -- beside the point. Furthermore, all these books, directly or indirectly, stress a critical point: in China, the individual is not the basic productive unit of society; it is the clan. Western individualism - i.e., society encouraging the individual to define himself independent of society - is, to many here, a luxury and, when times are bad, a danger to collective well being.

More intimately, Ha Jin's Waiting captures, in spare prose, how romantic love, the highest plane of Western fulfillment, is often sacrificed on the alter of familial obligation. The imperatives of clan, not the human being, reign supreme. The same author's novel of Chinese immigrants in the American South, "A Free Life," reinforces the durability of these values even in a fundamentally different social milieu.

Ambition vs. Regimentation

I don't, however, want to give them impression that I regard China as uni-dimensional, a society in which Everyman has been crushed into submission. The "Confucian conflict," the dynamic that unifies all Chinese except those struggling for survival, is characterized by tension between regimentation and ambition, the latter an impulse of forward advancement through societally-mandated, then internalized, benchmarks of success. By mastering "the rules," historically encapsulated in Confucian canon, one could move up the hierarchy of success. This "urge to surge," albeit while avoiding transgression of the norm, is hardwired into Han aspiration. Wonderful books such as Peter Hesslers River Town and Oracle Bones beautifully capture the industrious, clever resourcefulness of Chinese, both poor and wealthy alike. While Western-style overt rebellion is rarely attempted, every Chinese has a dragon in his heart. Even relatively negative portrayals of modern China - Jasper Becker's The Chinese, for example - contrast "the system's" conformism against mainlanders' energy, an inspiring snap, crackle and pop.

Transcendent Delight

Beyond ambition, the Chinese' most charming trait is a desire to transcend sometimes harsh, always restrictive, realities of daily life. Buddhist nirvana beckons even jaded businessmen. When dusk falls, city parks morph into makeshift dance halls, with youth and old alike falling into a lilting waltz. Every city block has two massage parlors and a bathhouse, respites in an urban jungle. Even the simplest clothes are brightly hued, signals of a joie de vie capable of punctuating concrete monotony Su Tong's novel, My Life as an Emperor, lyrically illustrates how even the highest level of earthly power is ephemeral and true happiness exists when cosmological harmony is realized.

Of course, it is impossible to truly understand Chinese psychology, culture and history without studying the language, a fascinating combination of ideographic representation, conceptual creativity and analytic precision. Through every character, the shape and structure of China's world view reveals itself. The best study guide, one that effortlessly makes sense of Mandarin's mystery, is Elizabeth Scurfield's Learning Chinese, written back in 1990.

The above books are great guides to the Chinese landscape. However, none of them can take the place of old fashioned curiosity, good maps of the hutongs in Beijing and longtongs of Shanghai and train trips into the hinterland. None take the place of just diving right in and exploring a constricted yet spicy and dynamic society.

Comments

[FairTalk]

It is really great that you wish to understand China better. I nearly gagged when you said Communisn in China was based on Confucianism. However, the books you mentioned are not likely to be all that helpful as they are writen thru the filter of Western thought, experience and understanding.

If you are not fluent in Chinese reading, I have a few suggestions for you. Get a small book of Chinese "sayings," and ask your Chinese friends to explain them to you. Get some primary school Chinese languge lesson books, you know, Dick and Jane in Chinese.

And by all means, have a Chinese friend help you buy a large Chinese-English AND a large English-Chinese dictionary. A quality dictionary. Begin anywhere.



The distance will tell the horse; time will reveal the human heart.

[mamacat]

I think there is an underlying premise that China is not "really" a dictatorship, because, it is posited, they have an understood, assumed Constitution. It is a very interesting idea, but the government is certainly capable of seeing that things get done the way they want them to get done, whether it follows traditional Chinese ideas or not. For instance, the way the central government was able to dictate the one-child policy to the nation, despite thousands of years of large families, illustrates a rift between custom and what is possible with real power.

A very interesting article, one that can also be thought of as illustrating the differences between how a people thinks of themselves, and how outsiders view them. Is America the "Beacon on the Hill", or is it the country that embraced slavery and genocide during its earlier, nation-building years? If we ignore history, as the saying goes, are we then doomed to repeat it, over and over again? One can even view Bush's war in Iraq in these terms. A nation that sees itself as pure good, and incapable of making serious mistakes, must by definition be doing the right thing all of the time, no matter what it does, and anyone who says or does anything to oppose its actions must be evil and anti-American. As Bush said, "You are either with us, or you are against us," with no room for reason, logic, or questions.

[JonathanFenby]

Since the writer was kind enough to mention my new book, may I just underline my agreement with a theme brought out here - the contrast between regimentation from the top and individualism at the grass (or street) roots in China. That has been the case since the First Emperor sent the template only for his emprie to fall apart after his death. Today the presence of a one-party system that has now ruled for 60 years and shows no sign of being ready to loosen its grip (a la USSR) and a society that has been upended, at elast in cities, by economic progress gives that contrast a new edge and depth.

[foolwriter]

Thank you for posting this list. I've always been fascinated by China and more than a little ashamed of my lack of knowledge regarding it's history and culture. I'm sure I'll pick up at least one of these volumes.

[Henry]

I had a Chinese classmate who made fun of my use of the word "absoultely". His admonition was that everything is relative, nothing absolute. When I oft times hear Americans express themselves as absolutely... I think of how the Chinese look at us and wonder how we are connected to reality.

[joebaggadonuts]

Americans are not well connected to reality, Henry.